


together, coming apart

by Carrogath



Series: together, coming apart [1]
Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, POV Second Person, Polyamory, Porn With Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-09
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:22:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24085039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carrogath/pseuds/Carrogath
Summary: If this is all a dream, then it's better than the ones you thought you were having.or,Edelgard wakes up beside Mercedes, and Mercedes alone. It's been a while since that's happened.
Relationships: Dorothea Arnault/Edelgard von Hresvelg/Mercedes von Martritz, Edelgard von Hresvelg/Mercedes von Martritz
Series: together, coming apart [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1901020
Comments: 8
Kudos: 58





	together, coming apart

**Author's Note:**

> While Edelgard and Mercedes are in a relationship with Dorothea in this fic, she isn't present anywhere in the story in person.

It’s one of those exceptionally rare mornings when you have Mercedes all to yourself.

Not that you’ve never been alone with her before—not quite—but it’s usually Dorothea who stays, if either of them, and indulges your languor in bed. For the better, too, you think, as your eyes chart a hundred different paths down her body and your thoughts tangle them up in each other trying to keep them all straight. She’s sitting within reach of you on the bed, barely at arm’s length, and all it would take is a single twist of your hips to be able to reach around her waist and trap her against you, and your blood sings and your senses thrum at the thought of everything you could to do her after that, possibility after possibility unfolding before you in your mind’s eye, blooming like so many drops of dye in the water, like azaleas in the midst of spring.

She’s sewing again. _We have tailors for that_ , you think, but she wouldn’t be Mercedes if she didn’t feel the need to assert her own independence somehow, separate from you, separate from the Church, and separate from anyone other than herself. The thread in her hands and the cloth in her lap are both white, the cloth likely cotton. It must not be something so elaborate, then—just a way to keep her hands busy. She clucks her tongue, pulls out a stitch. There’s a furrow in her brow, shadowed by the light pouring into the room from the windows. The windows are facing the courtyard. No one else can see you.

Goosebumps prickle your skin, cold air seeping through the thin fabric of your nightgown. You’ve already thrown the sheets off, but you’ve been staring at her for a while, desire like lazy licks of flame inside your throat and between your legs. Memories of mornings past push up from within the hazy morass of your mind, flooding the empty spaces, filling the vacancies in your head. It’s been _months_ since you’ve last had her, and though you can live without her comfortably enough while you’re apart, it almost feels an insult that she hasn’t acknowledged you when you’re less than a meter away. You know why—the reason hums in your veins and pierces your thoughts, marries hatred and fear with longing—but all the same, you want to tear the cause out of her, overwhelm her with your presence, compel her to look at you and you alone.

Stranger still is the fact that she wants you like this, rough and possessive and callous, wound up tight as a coiled spring. The thought sinks into your head, settles to the bottom as though it were nothing more than detritus. If you want her to look at you, she will, but with defiance. It’s like a game: see who breaks first. And without fail, that person will always be you.

She might give you what you want today. She might not. It’s not your choice what she decides; you have control over a thousand other aspects of her life; you could afford to grant her this. You should grant her this. Or rather, this was never yours to give, to dole out like indulgences from the Church, like pardons to a criminal, like mercy to a penitent. This is about dignity, not leniency. Equality, not subservience. You’re not grooming her to follow orders. You can’t take her identity away. It’s pleasing, in some ways, but frustrating, in others. You view the whole world through a lens of whether anything within it appeals to you. Whatever you find troublesome is to be destroyed, or changed, or trivialized.

And then there’s her.

You like to tell yourself that your relationship with her would be possible even without Dorothea’s intervention—that you could find some way to be with her regardless of what Dorothea thinks or wants—but the scales aren’t balanced, and under nearly every circumstance they’re tipped heavily in your favor. You could order the two of them killed, and Hubert would carry it out in a heartbeat. The palace is crawling with spies. Even if they were to scheme or plot against you, you have an entire army at your command. You are the state, and what are they? Two commoners who believe they have a grasp on your heart. They don’t trust you. You accept that. Mercedes trusts Dorothea; and Dorothea believes you; and you trust Mercedes to believe _her_. Your connection to her is so tenuous and so fragile and so delicate—frost creeping up the glass of a windowpane, a spiderweb swaying in the wind—that more often than not you find yourself consumed by fears of alienating her, of hurting her, of losing her to your own damnable hubris, and of losing Dorothea in turn, and the trust of everyone who believed you to be more than a demagogue and self-obsessed tyrant, waiting for the day you could rip off the mask and reveal the monster that lay underneath.

It’s a fear that’s well-deserved because you’ve made mistakes, and you’ve suffered for them. Randolph and Ladislava are never coming back. Outwardly, you’ll call it a necessary sacrifice, but inwardly, you blame yourself for misjudging the troops, the numbers, the odds. Supposedly, Byleth can rewind time (or could, and can’t anymore. You’ll never know, because you’ve never seen it happen. Numbly, you think, you’re still the product of forces obscured). How many times, you wonder, has Byleth rewound it to save you? (Nevertheless, you tell yourself, you alone are the arbiter of your own fate.) You’ll never know, and you’ll never ask. Your life is Byleth’s, just as their life is yours. It’s all you can do not to squander it (as you did in the past, in a time that never was, and was rightly punished for becoming that which you never dared to dream). In your nightmares, it is not Byleth who abandons you, but you who abandons them.

On your less lucid days, you wonder if those are really nightmares, or simply mirrors of a different truth.

You reach out to her, when the fear twists in your gut that none of this is real and you’re still trapped in the dungeons beneath the palace, having hallucinated everything that happened in your adult life, having never escaped in all of your twenty-odd years—

—and meet loose cloth over flesh, the latter pliant beneath your fingers. You shift to wrap your arms around her waist. It feels unreal in a different way, now: the sensations muddled and dreamlike, your face buried in the back of her dress, searching for her scent and the warmth of her skin. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t push you away, but she doesn’t turn to embrace you, either. You press two fingers against the dip of her spine, where she’s sensitive, running up and down the bones and the nerve until she shudders against them with an airy gasp. She reaches behind, tangles her fingers in the loosening braid of your hair, wiggles them as if to work out the knots. It’s playful. You’re safe.

“Edelgard,” she warns, giving your braid a tug, “I have to put my sewing away.”

You slacken the one-handed grip you had around her waist, groaning as the fingers leave your hair and her back slides up and away from your face. The place on the bed where she sat is warm with her body heat. You roll all the way to the right until you find the nightstand on which you’d placed your cup of water the night before, and take a gulp. Tepid, but otherwise potable.

“What’s your schedule look like for the day?” Mercedes asks, as she flits around the room. It’s too big—it’s the Emperor’s bedroom, so there’s no other size—and you aren’t sure what she’s even doing considering you didn’t have sex with her last night, so there shouldn’t be anything to clean up. Dorothea is out for a few more days on Mittelfrank business; you’ve been sleeping alone the past several evenings.

“It’s open until ten. I asked for breakfast to be delivered…”

“I left it on the vanity.”

You spot it out of the corner of your eye—a covered platter lies on the dressing-table on the other side of the room. It’s so far away from your thoughts and your person that you can hardly think to eat it now. “Ah. You?”

“Nothing.”

“That can’t be right.” You raise an eyebrow.

She sits down next to you, and looks at you. “Can it?”

 _Absolutely not._ You still the words that threaten to leave your tongue.

“Well, nothing until ten,” she continues, “but I suppose that’s all that matters, isn’t it?”

You lean back and stare at her, swallowing a bit. She’s dressed, but not for going out. She stayed with you while you slept, while you ogled her like a petty coward, while you worked up the nerve to do something about the fact that she never chanced to leave. She was being affectionate earlier, and you aren’t stupid.

Your eyes flicker to the stodgy old grandfather clock to your left, pushed against the wall between the windows of your room. It’s eight. You have the time. You might even be able to squeeze in breakfast, if you spend it wisely.

You know she’s thinking about sex when she looks at you, because that’s all you think about when you look at her. Your private life together is defined by it—it’s not always what she wants, necessarily, but it’s what she expects. Her expression is impassive and unwavering, her hands placed in her lap. Her body language says this: _Do whatever you will with me. I don’t expect anything else._

You could at least make her comfortable. “Let me hold you again.”

You curl up around her side, this time, instead of her back. She starts undoing your braid for real, this time, and you reach up and untangle it until it falls in loose waves at your back, all the way down to your hips. She brushes aside your hair and scratches at your neck, exactly as if you were a cat.

And it works. You curl into her harder, feeling her fingers comb through your hair and her nails scratch against your scalp. “Mm…” You stretch out on the bed, curling and uncurling your legs, feeling every bit the spoiled princess. When you look up, her expression is so hard to read, somewhere between amusement and affection and consternation, her brows drawn, her mouth caught between a smile and a frown. If you want to kiss her, you’ll have to push yourself up to grab her face. And if you want her to touch you, you have to ask. You weigh the possibilities in your mind. You could even surprise her by lying in bed for two hours and asking for nothing at all.

“What do you want?” You sit up.

“What do I want?” she parrots back. She looks a bit startled that you asked. That’s disheartening.

“Did you want to leave,” you ask, and despite your reluctance you find yourself drawing closer to her, “or did you want to stay here and spend some time with me?” You reach in, sink your fingers in her hair—it really is that thick—and look her in the eyes.

So many emotions pass over her face. “I don’t know,” she admits. “I was waiting for you.”

You let out a surprised laugh, and then lean in and kiss her chastely on the lips. If you kiss her any more than that, you won’t be able to stop. “Well, now I’m waiting for you,” you say. You want to kiss her again and do everything after that, and it’s so, so hard to still your hands, your head, your mouth.

She laughs, a bit nervous, maybe a bit relieved. “If that’s the case… Well, I’m still not going to leave. I missed you.” Her expression hardens, and molten heat shoots straight down through to your core. “That’s why I’m here.”

You wet your lips. “What about me did you miss?” Her eyes flicker; her chest rises and falls. She’s aroused, and you know it, and she knows that you do; she can’t hide it in her rigid posture or her sharpness of breath, the way she tries to contain herself despite the hungry look in her eyes.

She grips your shoulders, digs her palms into the flesh above your breasts. Then she nuzzles into the side of your neck. It’s a dizzying move, sending flutters through your chest and your pulse at a rampant pace.

“I missed this.” She nips lightly at your skin.

You start, more out of surprise than anything else.

“And this.” Then she sucks, sliding her hands down over your breasts to your waist. Her fingers settle over your ribcage as her mouth moves down your neck. Her tongue flicks out against your skin, teeth edging along the side—all her movements are so delicate and so careful; you can feel her nose, the moisture of her breath—and then she bites, right where the skin is loose in the crook of your neck and your shoulder, and you let out a shudder and a yelp. Her hands work roughly at your breasts, rubbing circles around the nipples, and the nightgown is thin enough that the contact makes you wet. She slides her hands down to remove your nightgown and you let her, pulling off your underwear so that when you lie on your back you’re fully naked before her.

She smiles, leaning over and resting her forearms against your chest, straddling your waist. She smirks. “Darling,” she says.

“Mercedes,” you breathe. You’ve never seen a woman so beautiful.

(All right, you think to yourself, so there _is_ Dorothea.)

She undresses, and the shedding of clothes distracts you from your own arousal; you want to drink the sight of her in, to hold her in your gaze forever. Not even to take her—just to look and to look and to look, for the sheer aesthetic pleasure of it. She smiles, glancing out of the corner of her eye when she notices you staring. Then she straddles you again, and you can feel her wet against the insides of your thighs, her hands pressed against your stomach, against the muscles of your abdomen. She grinds a bit against you, just to watch your reaction.

You bite back a moan. You won’t give her that satisfaction. You glance around the room, and when you do, the absence of Dorothea suddenly feels palpable, like you’re expecting another set of eyes in the room, a spectator, the third in the set.

“You’re looking for her?” asks Mercedes.

“Dorothea?” you say.

“You usually don’t.”

“She’ll hate to miss out on this,” you say, rubbing up against her to relieve the pressure on your clit.

“Mm.” Mercedes thumbs your clit lightly, lazily, and your pussy twitches in response. Goddess. She drags her thumb down, and you groan at the pressure on your labia. Mercedes’s weight isn’t uncomfortable, but she’s bigger than you and she’s heavy, and there’s no way you can lift her off the bed with just your hips. When she drags your thumb inside of you to wet it, you groan, jerking your hips up against the weight. She grinds back down. You swear; you’re sensitive, and even though all she’s doing is brushing her thumb against your clit and your opening, it’s driving you absolutely mad.

Her hips lift up and off of you, and you sigh practically in relief. She positions herself between your legs, stroking your clit until you start to rock against her hand.

“Good?”

It’s not enough, but you’re plenty wet and it’s pleasurable, so you groan in affirmation, too focused on the sensations she’s feeding you to pay attention to much else. You gasp a bit when you feel fingers enter, wiggling your hips to urge them further inside, planting the soles of your feet against the bed and pushing yourself against her hand to sink them deeper in.

Mercedes is mean. You’re so wet that a teasing touch barely registers, and that’s all you’re getting right now. She strokes you here, stretches you there—never enough to stimulate beyond a second or two. She starts you up, then stops again, until your teeth are bared in frustration and you brace yourself up on your elbows and glare up at her.

“What’s wrong?”

She’s smiling. She knows exactly what’s wrong. She knows you like overstimulation; she knows you like it hard and fast and bent out of shape, twisted around her hand and mewling uncontrollably. You want to lose your mind. You _try_ to lose it. All you want is a fucking orgasm, and just because you asked her what she wanted today she tries to lord it over you.

And maybe she’s right to do that.

“I’m sorry.” She giggles, and all transgressions are instantly forgiven. “I was just having fun.” She thrusts her fingers inside of you, rougher than you expect. You yelp. She is definitely the one having fun here.

You’re not exactly impatient—you want to spend time with her however you can, and it’s been a long time since you’ve seen her smile so much, even more so given that Dorothea’s not around to crack jokes at your expense—but you are wet, and if nothing else your body is starting to get confused after all the foreplay.

Mercedes smooths out her expression, straightening up, and stares down at you. Her fingers crook, and it’s an easy slide. She works you seriously, this time, into a comfortable rhythm that she and Dorothea likely already know by heart. Your breaths quicken; your hips start to twitch. It’s good. It’s good, and it’s only getting better. Her thrusts come inside you deeper and harder as she matches your pace, and you reach up to grab at her shoulders, her back. Your breaths are coming in gasps, now, your hips rolling into every movement of her hand. She twists her fingers, and you twist back, arching into the next few thrusts. You’re starting to fold in on yourself—Mercedes grabs your shoulder to hold you still, curls her hand to get her closer to where you want her—and you can feel your inner walls start to clench.

“I’m close.” You say it before the thought even crosses your mind. Mercedes merely hums in response, sounding as casual as ever, but the look in her eyes is focused and intent. The eye contact makes you gasp and clench again, and she meets your gaze as she brings you up, up, up. You’re panting, open-mouthed. Your mouth is dry. “Shit…”

She glances away—your first thought is that she can’t take much more of this either—and your pussy is throbbing; _you_ can’t take much more, but whatever she’s doing isn’t enough even though you’re still so, so close. You cant your hips a little higher up, hoping the movement will have some sort of effect on her, something to bring you over the edge, and Mercedes looks down between your legs, noticing… something; you’re not sure what. Her hand is making wet noises now; that’s hardly a surprise, since she teased you for so long.

Then she slides her entire body down, and you realize that she’s going to use her mouth.

You rock against her face, gasping as your clit enters her mouth, and then you’re coming undone, fucking yourself against her hand and against her mouth until you come. It’s good, good as any you’ve ever had, and Mercedes’s tongue swipes against your clit to work you through the aftershocks as you pump your hips against her hand. She pulls her mouth away, her lips red, her chest heaving, and you clench around her again at the sight of it. She strokes you a few more times with her fingers before pulling out and letting you catch your breath, and it takes a moment before you find the courage to make eye contact again.

It’s a mistake. You look away. “Fuck.”

She lowers herself against you so you can kiss her, and you can taste yourself on her tongue. She’s surprisingly composed, but the longer you kiss her the more her composure begins to ebb. It doesn’t take much—you shift your thigh between her legs, applying pressure—before she starts to twist and moan against you, breasts swaying. You could grind your thigh against her like this, tit for tat. She has to be close by now, and an unsatisfying orgasm would be kind of terrible, but also kind of amusing. You want to make her come properly, because you want to see it, but part of you is also petty enough to think of this as an argument that somebody has to win.

You slide down to kiss at her breasts, sucking unabashedly at her nipple. She squirms on top of you, and this, you suppose, is satisfying in its own way. You bring your hand up to fondle the breast that isn’t currently occupied by your mouth, and she grinds wetly against your outstretched thigh. It occurs to you that penetration might be unwanted at this point. Mercedes knows herself well enough to ask.

“Mercedes,” you breathe, pushing her away so your mouth isn’t muffled by her breasts, “what do you need?”

She stops grinding against your thigh, briefly distracted by the question. Her own thighs are quivering. The lengthy pause that follows, you assume, is to allow her to gather her thoughts. “I don’t need you inside of me,” she says, and you feel a sense of pride swell in your chest for being able to guess at least that much. “I… Just keep doing that.”

“Teasing your breasts?”

Her hips rock back and forth, ostensibly of their own accord. “Y-yes.”

“Understood.” You press down on her back to signal an end to the conversation, and do as you’re told, licking at her areola and kissing between her breasts, enjoying yourself as she pleasures herself against you. When she comes, she comes completely upright, with both her thighs wrapped around a single one of your own, her whole body going rigid. She slides against you to ride herself out—you’re really going to have to wipe yourself off after this—and you nudge your leg a little more into her, enjoying the view. She sighs as she comes down from it, gasping for breath. And then she looks down at you and smiles, as pure and beatific as a woman coming down from an orgasm could ever possibly be.

“Thank you.”

Your mouth falls open, and your words fail you (always, always at the worst possible times). “R… Y-yes, of course. Anything for you, Mercedes.” You glance away, blushing to the tips of your ears.

She pushes herself up off of you. Your eyes glance back at the clock. It’s not ten yet, and you have plenty of time to spare, but you know you’re not getting another orgasm out of her. You’re both covered in sweat and saliva and everything else, and she throws a washcloth at your face while she wipes herself down.

“I’ll have to remember to take a bath later,” she mumbles, red in the face and all of a sudden self-conscious. She wipes at her neck and her chest and under her arms, wiping off the sweat before finally moving the cloth between her legs, and it comes away sticky. Your heart leaps into your throat. “Stop watching.”

“Sorry.” You look away. You’re still so sensitive; you don’t trust yourself to wipe yourself with a cloth and not get turned on again, so you wait.

 _This probably won’t change anything_ , you think distantly, as Mercedes starts to change into her proper day clothes.

She looks at you, and then her brow furrows. “Edelgard?”

“Mm? Yes? What is it?” You sit up, your concern for her overruling everything else.

She touches the back of her neck. It’s a curious gesture. “Um…” She looks down. “It was different today, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. Y-yes. I suppose.” You’re quiet. You owe Dorothea for today. You owe Dorothea for a lot.

Her face scrunches up in concentration. “I like it the way it usually is,” she murmurs, “don’t get me wrong…” her eyes flicker up to your face, “but why the change today?”

Ordinarily, you think, you would have kissed her first, touched her first, taken her first. That wasn’t always the case, though it was the last time the two of you had sex, and that’s more or less the impression that Dorothea is under, that the sex is always rough, that the tension between you and Mercedes is always running high.

It’s more than just that you wanted something different, this time. And you’ve always been in love with her, even before you started sleeping with her. It was different because you asked her what she wanted; it was different because you let her tease you for as long as you did; it was different because you didn’t impose any of your own desires onto her, no matter what happened. You want to have sex with her the way you normally do, but you want this, too.

“How was it?” Your mouth opens, closes. You can’t look her in the face. “The sex?”

“Not as good.” She pauses. “Not as intense.” When your eyes dart toward her, she isn’t smiling, but she isn’t frowning, either. “But it wasn’t about the sex today, was it?” She smiles at you, then, a wry, complicated thing. “You were thinking about something before we started. I could tell.” Then her smile curls into something devious. “Even you can’t stare at me for that long.”

You blush. “W-well…”

“What was it?”

Your jaw quivers as your mouth falls open. “I-I…” Your fingers sink into the sheets. Your eyes search the room, turning up nothing. “I’m afraid. You know I am. Of losing control. Of making mistakes.” Your voice cracks. “Of losing you.”

“Oh.” Her voice is painfully soft. “Oh, Edelgard.” She takes one step toward you, and then another.

“You hate me.” _Shut up, shut up!_ “You know exactly what I’m capable of. You’ve seen me do it. You have to hold me accountable, I-I…” You curl up into yourself, bringing your knees up to your chin.

“Edelgard,” she whispers, “enough.” She presses a kiss to your lips, then to your cheek.

You press your hands into your face. You won’t cry. Not in front of her. Not because of _this_. “If I assume too much,” you breathe, “or if you’re too afraid to question me… to stop me… Why do you think…” You wipe the tears from your face. “Ugh.” You want Dorothea to watch you have sex with Mercedes not only because it’s hot, but also because you want her to stop you if something goes wrong, spirals out of control. You want Mercedes so much and so often that it overwhelms you. And if she gives too much of herself to you, then there won’t be anything left to take back.

She kisses you on the forehead, then presses yours to her own. “You did the right thing.”

You let out a shuddering breath.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “for pressuring you.”

“No,” you reply, taking her face in your hands so you can kiss her, “don’t be. I’ve never seen you smile so much.” You kiss her again. “If we’re going to be in a relationship, then I have to let you use me, too.”

She smiles, and her mouth wobbles, and you run your thumb against her lips to try to smooth it out. “Thank you,” she says again. “Thank you. Thank you for letting me be who I am. Thank you for just… this. All of it. Dorothea and everything else. I mean it.” She kisses you hard, and then pulls away. When you get a better look at her, you notice that she’s crying.

“Oh.” You wipe at your eyes. “Mercedes.” You’re lost for words again.

And maybe that’s all right, for once. Maybe you don’t always need to know the right words to say.

You finally eat your breakfast and then put on your clothes, and Mercedes helps you put up your hair, watching you in the vanity mirror.

“What do we tell Dorothea?” Mercedes asks.

“Nothing,” you reply. “She’ll either figure it out on her own, or we put on a show for her next time we have sex, and she’ll be none the wiser. Why?” You glance up at her in the mirror. “What kind of sex are you having with her?”

She blushes and looks away, nearly dropping the lock of hair in her hands. “That isn’t for you to know.”

“Of course not.” You can’t fathom why she’d be embarrassed at this point, but one thing at a time, you suppose.

Mercedes finishes doing your hair, then kisses you on the cheek as you stand up. She squeezes your shoulders. “Good luck.”

You scoff at her. “Where I’m going, I don’t need luck.”

“Then may the goddess be with you—” she kicks you lightly in the back of the knee— “and don’t tell me that you don’t need that, either.”

She’s right, of course, so you clamp your mouth shut and you go, and even long after she’s gone, you can’t help but feel a little extra blessed for the rest of the day.


End file.
